Stuart Harrison
PAPER for SAHANZ 2005
‘Celebrating Civicness
in Modern Architectural Language through Arcading’
ABSTRACT:
This paper will
examine how selected architects attempted to present a civic quality in
modernist public buildings, focusing on the technique of figuring architectural
language through the arch and arcade. The paper will discuss selected public
projects designed at the same time in the post-war period by Frank Lloyd Wright
(Marin County Civic Center, 1957-70), Oscar Niemeyer (Ministry of Justice in
Brasilia, 1957) and locally Roy Grounds (Academy of Sciences in Canberra,
1957-59). The work of Louis Kahn will also come under review. The projects are
by architects who worked simultaneously across the world, and whose careers
have ultimately been regarded as operating on the edge of Modernist dogma, and
addressed the task of making the civic role of a building evident.
Grounds used the
referential device of the arch, and the Modern aspirations of abstraction and
lightness are also rejected in the massive quality of many of Grounds’ later
projects, including the Academy of Sciences. Kahn’s use of arched forms is
argued as part of a lineage that passes to Venturi & Scott-Brown and the
architectural discourse of Post-Modernism. Both Wright and Niemeyer combine
repetition and formal manipulation of the arch to produce civic buildings that
are both modern and grounded within traditional forms of the civic.
This discussion
is part of wider research into the nature of the civic in architecture and its
application in current environments.
ILLUSTRATIONS:
Roy Grounds,
Academy of Sciences, Canberra, 1959
Photography by
Stuart Harrison
Oscar Niemeyer, Ministry
of Justice, Brasilia, 1957)
Photography by
Marcus White, used with permission
PAPER:
This paper
attempts to demonstrate that several Modern architects addressed the issue of
distinguishing civic or public buildings at the same period in the mid to late
1950s using similar method of employing arch-based arcades. Both arches and
arcades will discussed in this paper, and an arch is referred to as commonly
known but not commonly used (in the 1950s) architectural device, a readable
figure. An arcade as discussed here is formed through the repetition of arches,
typically as part of the façade of a building.
It is generally
accepted that Modernism, as an international movement, moved away from
associative forms of typology and decoration to a language of abstraction and
universality, that had its roots in a social vision for humanity, where status
or ability to read bourgeois semantic systems would not be required. It is the
proposition of this paper that several modern architects simultaneously
confronted the issue of making the function of civic buildings expressed. The
civic here is seen as the collective desire to value the instruments of public
and urban life.
This paper
examines several buildings designed at a similar time, that of the late 1950s.
At this time, following the Second World War, modernism had become the principal
mode of operation for Architecture, exhibiting qualities such as expression of
function, universal language without decoration and associative motifs. It is
the proposition of this paper that certain architects saw this mode as limited
and sort an architectural language to distinguish civic buildings – so that in
universalising modern city, they would be read as different to other new
buildings. The arch based arcade is developed by these architects as the system
of readable architectural language as been collapsed to historicism by the
massive success of architectural Modernism.
These architects’
identification of a gap in architectural modernism is later addressed widely in
the movement known as Post-Modernism, where the dogma of modernism is inverted
in an attempt to address the perceived failures of identification of Modern
buildings. This return to ideas such as typology and style was then in turn
widely rejected as both kitsch and lacking in substance. The following
architectural movements that operate to this day did not provide an alternative
to this absence within modernism, and this gap remains. The using of the
referential arch introduced into modernism by the architects in this is still
used by some architectural practices to address the same concerns.
Louis Kahn
(1901-1974) spent almost his entire career at the task of developing an
appropriate architectural language for community and public buildings, as it
documented by Sarah Williams Goldhagen in her book Louis Kahn’s Situated
Modernism. Moving from an expression of technology and the organic to form
and association, Kahn employs simplified historic devices such as the arch to
this aim. Furthermore, he develops the circular ‘cut-out’ as distinctive
development on the arch to become a new type, whilst maintaining a quality of
abstraction and purity. Kahn’s use of traditional arch forms is demonstrated in
projects such as the Kimball Art Museum (1973), but Kahn begins to develop an
interest in the referential device of the arch in 1957 when reworking his
(Trenton) Jewish Community Center project[1],
as is extensively documented by Goldhagen,
Kahn, acknowledging this new direction, added Roman
arches to the now brick façade which coincided with the concrete beams that
supported the gymnasium roof (during this period he was also considering arched
windows for the Richards Medical Center).[2]
Kahn’s use of
arches and circular cut-outs is gradually introduced in his work as he moved
away from an organic and technology inspired language. By 1959 Kahn’s movement
away from this has become clear, as Goldhagen states;
For Kahn, modern buildings that echoed historical ones
bound a viewer to a greater community of past users: ‘modern space is really
not different from Renaissance space,’ he said in 1959. ‘We still want domes,
we still want walls, we still want arches, arcades, and loggias of all kinds.’
In embracing architectural precedents, Kahn reshaped his architectural language
to reinforce the social bonds that make a community cohere.[3]
Goldhagen locates
a critical interest in the mid-fifties in historicism, particularly in the
classical; “Edward Durrell Stone, and Yamaskai followed (Philip) Johnson’s
lead, producing in the middle of the decade a mini-revival of classicism, or
formalism”[4]
Goldhagen’s book revisits accepted ideas about Kahn, particular that he was a
solitary figure of individual genius, and suggests he was continually
influenced by other figures as he became increasing involved in teaching,
including students Charles Moore and Robert Venturi - who he assessed in 1950.
The practice of
Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) is well documented, but his late work, normally
associated with the Guggenheim Museum in New York, showed a change of
direction. The Marin County Civic Center (1957-70), California, is the clearest
built example of the shift in imagery and language, as Wright is called upon to
design a civic component of the expanding post-war American city. Completed in
two stages, both after his death, Marin County Civic Center demonstrates an
allusion to the repetitive arches of a Roman viaduct. Twenty minutes after
arriving at the site, Wright said to his associate Aaron Green, “I’ll bridge
these hills with graceful arches.”[5]
The use of the
arch had occurred before in Wright’s work - the V. C. Morris Store, San
Francisco (1948) used a single Syrian derived arch. Repetition of arches
represents a shift, and can be seen to a lesser extent in the Wauwatosa
Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church scheme that ran concurrently to Marin
County, the design of which commenced one year earlier in 1956. The Monona
Terrace Civic Center in Madison, Wisconsin was commenced by Wright in 1938 and
remarkably not built until 1997. Wright revises the scheme in 1957[6] (as he starts the design of Marin County)
and the Monona Terrace project (originally known as Orin Terraces) begins to
develop an arching façade treatment as the project mutates from a large
bridge-like series of terraces in 1938 with three large domes into a singular
building with a curved front with grand arches. These arches, like those of the
Greek Orthodox Church form the boundary between inside and outside, rather than
an arcade. Importantly, the Monona project revisions represent Wrights’ evolved
approach to designing a civic centre.
At Marin County,
the allusion to a load bearing Roman viaduct or aqueduct is perhaps informed
partially by the site and generally large-scale nature of the project - to
which a bridge is an analogy. The system of arches used on Marin County
exhibits an underlying classical vertical system (of decreasing weight with
height), where the larger spanning arches occupy the lower levels, and then
decrease in size up the façade. The top series of arches are continuous to form
circular profiles, in a point of departure from the illusion to a Roman
viaduct.
Wright’s
operations on these arches however reveal a different quality that moves them
away from the load bearing traditional arch, for the main body of arches are
not structural and are supported out from the main concrete construction. This
is in a manner similar to a contemporary curtain wall system and Wright makes
no attempt to suggest that they are thick - built as a stucco cladding on a
steel frame. In addition the junction between the arches is almost point-like.
Here the arches seem to hang from the building, inverting the structural logic
of the Roman viaduct. This subversion
of a Roman series of arches and lightness of the system explains the building’s
inclusion in two mainstream science fiction films as a building of the future.[7]
Detractors of
Wright’s late work suggest his remoteness to the project and large practice
workload account for the thinness of the building and its lack of detail,
unlike in his early work. Robert McCarther is typical in this view:
Like many of Wright’s late works, this design for the
Marin County Civic Center seems to have developed without any significant
constraints, limitations or even goals, and is merely an exercise in unfettered
imagination.[8]
The Marin County
Civic Center was one of Wright’s few built civic projects for a government.
Despite his enormous body of work, Wright was principally an architect for
private clients, both houses and businesses. Another account for Wright’s
change of direction in this late work is possibly a search for a way to
demonstrate the civic; rather than a lack of interest, recycling or lack of
time as suggested by McCarther[9].
In addition, the project was designed and built on a tight budget.
By evacuating the
structural role of the arches and expressing this, they became a screen and
signaling device, identifying the civic function of the centre. In order for
this to be successfully communicated, residents would need to decode arches,
particularly in a serialised form as denoting of building of some civic nature.
Prior to the Marin County’s occupation of the Wright building, the County
administration was principally located within the simple Classical temple
fronted San Rafael Court House.[10]
Historic images of San Rafael reveal the only linear buildings with repeating
elements were those for railways. Given that the Marin County Civic Center is a
bent (at the dome) linear building that buries itself into the two hills of
site, it has a continuous quality. It is impossible to say whether the population
of Marin County was immediately aware of the building’s purpose – there is
little doubt as to whether the building was distinguished from its surroundings
however.
In 1893 Wright
entered the Milwaukee Library Competition (his closest previous project of this
type), with an symmetrically composed classical scheme, featuring a central
dome above a temple portico. The Marin building can be read as a radical
reworking of this scheme, with dome in the middle. Elements of association and
repetition are used in both schemes, to give them a grandness of vision that is
transferable from the pre-modern to the modern. Wright does not develop a
modern architectural language for the civic until 1957.
Prior to Oscar
Niemeyer’s (1906-) commencement on the government buildings at Brasilia, his
use of arch forms, or curved profiles generally in elevation was restricted to
the Chapel of St. Francis of Assisi (curving elements were frequently used in
plan). The chapel is part of a complex of buildings (1942-43) for a residential
development at Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, in the Brazilian State of Minas
Gerais. The chapel is the most well known of the suite, which also includes a
casino (now a museum), restaurant, and a yacht club all on an artificial lake.
The well known series of four ground touching vaults on the mural façade
creates an asymmetrical configuration of reinforced concrete shells. Here,
Niemeyer uses arching forms to distinguish the chapel from the other buildings
he designed in the suite, suggesting a principle where buildings of more social
significance are apparent. This reflects the chapel as the most civic building
of this collection. Niemeyer is Jewish by birth but not religious, and the
chapel after completion was not blessed by the Catholic Church[11],
assumedly due to its failure to appear as a church building. The buildings’
fame is often attributed to its innovative use of concrete, “The Church of St
Francis is the birthplace of proper Brazilian Architecture. With its
self-supporting vaulting of varying dimensions, it makes use of the structural
and sculptural potential of concrete.”[12]
The use of curves
in Niemeyer’s work is often attributed to either landscape, or by Niemeyer
himself as natural forms such as the profile of the human body[13].
The issue of type is often not engaged with. The other buildings at Pampulha
use curves in plan, but not in elevation. The residential landscape by the lake
is not overtly undulating, therefore not establishing a connection of the
arching roofline of the chapel to the invented landscape.
The commission
for the new Brazilian capital of Brasilia was a direct result of the Pampulha
project, through Juscelino Kubitschek who was the Governor of Minas Gerais and
had initiated Pampulha, and then Brasilia after his election as President of
Brazil in 1956. Soon after Niemeyer commenced the design of a suite of
governmental buildings - where a system of typological hierarchy in
architectural language is further developed.
Some indication of Niemeyer’s adherence to an appropriate
system of hierarchical expression can be read through a statement related to
monumentality, “I have never been afraid of monumentality when a corresponding
theme justifies it”[14] Justification
is key in this statement, making clear Niemeyer considers appropriateness
in his work; that not all buildings should be as expressive as others. In this
way, the work can be seen to fall into a system of decorum.[15]
The collection of
buildings around the eastern end of Brasilia’s Monumental Axis form the key
components of Government. In the centre is the twin domed Congresso
(Parliament), immediately behind (to the east) at to each side is the Palacio
do Planalto (Executive Branch) and the Supremo Tribunal Federal (Supreme Court)
– with the Plaza of the Three Powers between these three. In front (west) of
the Congresso and also to each side and opposite each other are Palacio
Itamaraty (Foreign Affairs) and the Ministry of Justice. Valerie Fraser
discusses how the Itamaraty Palace and Justice Ministry relate to the other
pair of buildings on the other side of the Congresso,
These two ministries are again ‘palaces’, like the
Planalto and Supreme Court beyond. Each is enclosed with a modern version of a
classical peristyle, this time with the colonnades the right way up, but having
a more traditional type, Niemeyer then backs off again: the structures are not
faced in classical marble but left as explicitly modern coarse-textured
concrete.[16]
In addition, the
ministry buildings further west and out from the Congresso after Ministry of
Justice and Itamaraty Palace become simple vertically louvered slab blocks,
with no arcading or colonnading; and are general government administration. The
Brasilia buildings are essentially glazed boxes with some form of treatment
wrapping around them.
Fraser suggests
these two buildings are less radical in their operations on the traditional
arcaded form than the Planalto and Supreme Court, where Niemeyer develops an
inverted and double arch system, running perpendicular to the main facades. The
Palacio da Alvorada (‘Palace of the Dawn’ – the Presidential Residence) departs
from a traditional reading the most - by inverting the arcade as readable in
elevation. This building is not accessible to the public and is removed from
the main concentration of public buildings. The materiality of Alvorada Palace
is white painted concrete, rather than the marble facing of Planalto Palace and
the Supreme Court. In addition Niemeyer makes the reading of the concrete
arches of Alvorada Palace as thin as possible, this coupled with the whiteness
of the arches suggests them as far more delicate than the other more robust
buildings directly around the Congresso. The overall scale of this building is
lower than the others, perhaps akin to a large villa (suiting a residence). Its
placement off the ordering armature of the Monumental Axis also plays down its
role as an instrument of government. The thinning of the edges that assist in
achieving this lightness is possible with concrete as the exterior finish – to
clad this is stone would involve complex faceting of the material. The arches
that are stone clad for the Planalto Palace and Supreme Court are by the same
logic flat, or two-dimensional.
The Ministry of
Justice, although equal with the Itamaraty Palace across from it in the wider
system, deviates from Itamaraty Palace’s regularity considerably. The key
operation to the arch on this building is the asymmetrical arch system on the
southern (axis facing) façade. These half arches repeat in the same direction
across this facade, like a giant order with the wall set back behind them. The
directional nature of these arches is revealing, going against the flow of the
traffic on the road in front, but gesturing toward the Congresso and Plaza.
Interestingly, the opposite north façade, with the same bay spacing, employs a
more traditional fully rounded arch, registering its distance away from the
Congresso and Monumental Axis. Indeed, all four facades of the Ministry of
Justice are different – the eastern façade is a series of even simple vertical
blade columns, whereas the western façade is a dense varying cluster of the
same blade columns, at differing spaces. Assumedly this dense array is to block
harsh western sun hitting the glazed wall – a consideration not addressed on
Itamaraty Palace opposite. A photograph of this façade from the Birkhauser book
on Niemeyer shows the western façade of Itamaraty Palace with curtains drawn
and several wall air-conditioners installed in the glazed wall.[17]
It seems that the built design of Itamaraty Palace is a redesign, whereas the
Ministry of Justice is not.[18]
Different dates for both buildings make it hard to suggest if the design of one
affected the design of the other, or if they had originally intended to be
different.
Justin Read
speculates on the use of arching in the buildings at Brasilia;
Brasília, we
should recall, was built for a nation that had not fully “modernized” by the
time the capital opened in 1960; at the same time, it is precisely the urge to
modernize that produced a city that seemed far more “modern” than any other at
the time, either in the third world or the first. Paradoxically, much of the
sense of modernity surrounding it stems from Niemeyer’s employment of “surreal”
curved forms—to produce the sense that something “new” had been built unlike
anything built before.[19]
Fraser cites
Niemeyer to establish the connection with arch as a historic device;
I rejoice in realizing that these forms bestowed individuality and originality upon the Palaces in their modest way and (and this I deem important) establish a link with the architecture of colonial Brazil.[20]
Niemeyer used the
arch as an associative device, and as such recognised the limitations of the version of modernism that
adheres to abstraction as universal social device. Niemeyer, as a dedicated
communist, could be no closer to the desire for an open society that is as far
from the elitism of the pre-independent and pre-20th Century world as possible.
However, a system of hierarchical architectural language is employed using new
concrete technology. The differences in use depending on building type
indicates Niemeyer was not making architecture as fluid and expressive as
possible in every case, that buildings demonstrate their place in a hierarchy.
Niemeyer’s work
came to Australia through the Architectural Review and via the book
Brazil Builds, Architecture new and old, 1652-1942 by Phillip Goodwin. This
accompanied the Brazil Builds MOMA exhibition in 1943, and came to
Australia toward the end of Second World War. James Birrell, studying at
Melbourne Technical College (now RMIT) at this time recalls these arrivals in
Australia after the War.[21]
Birrell transferred studies to the University of Melbourne, where he studied
under Roy Grounds, Robin Boyd and other well-known Melbourne architectural
figures. The influence of Niemeyer and Roy Grounds (1905-1981) is clear within
Birrell’s work and it is possible that Niemeyer’s work came to Grounds in the
post-war period.
The Academy of
Sciences in Canberra was Grounds’ first major commission and was designed in
1957 and completed in 1959.[22]
Grounds’ biggest works before this were multi-residential flats, and this
project represented a major typological leap for Grounds, designing a new
institutional building. The pure low-slung dome building shows a simultaneous
development with the domic forms of the Congresso in Brasilia, the design of
which commenced sometime between 1956 and 1958. Niemeyer’s use of arcades is
restricted to orthogonal buildings, whereas Grounds is able to produce an
arcaded edge to the base of the copper clad concrete dome. Like Niemeyer’s
Ministry of Justice and Itamaraty Palace, Grounds uses water around the
perimeter of the building, in an interaction with the arcade. For the Academy
of Sciences this also provides a water collection point from the copper roof
and animates reflected light onto the vertical perimeter glass wall and into
the spaces inside. The continuous circular arcade opens and closes to the
surroundings with the flow of the complex curved arch, the depth of which
changes in relation to the user. As a result, there is a changing quality of
enclosure around the edge. This, coupled the reflective consequences of water
and glass, make this arcade an unexpectedly dynamic and public space, given the
purity and mass of the form.
The Academy of
Sciences has been dubbed for many years the ‘Martian Embassy’[23],
which tells of the building’s science fiction-like qualities, similar to that
of the Marin County Civic Center. Grounds’ design was selected from a
competition process as the most radical[24].
At the same time it utilises traditional forms such as the arch, symmetry and
moat. Like Niemeyer’s public buildings in Brasilia, the effect of deep arcades
and colonnades around the building is the creation of deep shadowed facades,
also suggesting a difference from generic building types.
The interest in
pure geometry had been escalating in Grounds’ work, but extends back to the
Round (Henty) House (1950). Conrad Hamann suggests that the Academy of Sciences
draws from Eero Saarinen’s Kresge Auditorium (1950-55) at MIT, being also a
“large scale geometric work”[25]
which Grounds is believed to have visited. Precedent for Grounds’ use of
arches, or arcades, is not immediately apparent, especially given the
simultaneous nature of the Niemeyer work in Brasilia. The Academy represents
Grounds’ first use of the arch, and can be seen as a prototype to the
monumental National Gallery of Victoria completed in 1968. Normally regarded as
a massive enlargement of Grounds’ experimental own house in Hill Street,
Toorak, Melbourne (1952-53), the National Gallery is different to this house
via the use of the central arch (forming a single arch arcade), rather than
conventional doorway on the house. The common denominator between Academy of
Sciences and National Gallery, as public buildings, is the use of an archway –
suggesting Grounds is using it as a civic device.
The reworking of
the arch and arcade is a strategy that that does not involve pure invention in
architectural language, but operations and reconfiguration of an existing
language still alive in the consciousness of often classically trained
architects. For a general population that sees civic buildings as pre-modern,
and modern architecture as the style of reconstruction - mass housing, industry
and commerce; the arch can connote the civic. This proposition, whether true or
not, seems to be the assumption by which the featured architects in this paper
rely on for design of these institutional and civic projects. The arch however
in the pre-modern period was not an exceptional device, and featured on many
types of buildings. Only with the onslaught of Modernism does the arch gain
this meaning of connoting the civic as it is no longer widely used in either
civic or utilitarian buildings.
The projects
examined in this paper use repeating arches, often to form arcades rather than
singular arch openings in studied civic projects. Repetition is a key tenet of
modernism, as is the use of new materials and technologies. The projects these
Architects develop around 1957 all show a major departure from the universality
and non-referential qualities of the ‘International Style’ or Modernism
generally[26], as they
all attempt to distinguish their new civic buildings from the postwar city that
is becoming dominated by Modernism itself, as it became the default
architectural style.